Steven Pressfieldhttps://stevenpressfield.com
Website of author and historian, Steven Pressfield.Wed, 11 Sep 2019 08:56:36 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.118237506The Mystery Makes the Hero Choosehttps://stevenpressfield.com/2019/09/the-mystery-makes-the-hero-choose/
https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/09/the-mystery-makes-the-hero-choose/#commentsWed, 11 Sep 2019 08:56:36 +0000https://stevenpressfield.com/?p=18828Let’s stay with Blade Runner in this post, but let’s go back to the 1982 original starring Harrison Ford and Sean Young and directed by Ridley Scott (screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples.)

Sean Young as Rachael in the 1982 “Blade Runner”

If indeed, as we’ve been positing in previous posts,

The female carries the mystery

and

The male’s role is to uncover the mystery,

then what happens when he (remember, the “male” can be a female too, as long as she acts in the archetypal rational/assertive/aggressive style of a male) does uncover the mystery?

Answer: he is thrust into a moral crisis.

He is forced to choose.

In the 1982 Blade Runner, the mystery is carried by the character of Rachael (Sean Young.)

The male hero is Blade Runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). His profession is to hunt down and “retire,” i.e. kill, the artificial humans called replicants. In one of the movie’s opening scenes Deckard is sent to the Tyrell Corporation, manufacturer of the new Nexus 6 series of replicants, to test one of these new models on a “Voight Kampf machine.” The machine can tell if a subject is a real human or a replicant.

The founder of the corporation, Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), has other ideas however. He wants Deckard to use the machine on a real human first.

TYRELL

I want to see a negative before I provide you with a positive.

He summons Rachael (Sean Young), introducing her as his assistant. Deckard runs the test. Sure enough, the machine says Rachael is a replicant.

Though Deckard ends the test without comment, Rachael reads this in his eyes.

Up to that moment, Rachael had no clue that she was artificial. She thought she was a human.

See how she’s “carrying the mystery?”

The movie’s “A” story is already rolling. Deckard has been ordered to track down a team of rebel replicants including Roy (Rutger Hauer) and Pris (Daryl Hannah) who have highjacked an Off-World shuttle and come to Earth with designs of mayhem.

Deckard plunges in to tracking them down.

There’s only one problem.

He has fallen in love with Rachael.

At the same time, Rachael is reeling emotionally from the discovery of her true identity. If she is artificial, what is she? Does she have a soul? Is she human? She has completely convincing memories from childhood. Where did they come from? Implanted by the Tyrell Corporation? Then who or what is she?

Remember too that Deckard’s job is to kill replicants.

Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard in the 1982 “Blade Runner”

Does that mean he must kill Rachael? Yes, says his cop boss Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh).

To make the moral choice even harder for Deckard, in one shoot-out on the street, Rachael saves his life by killing a replicant who’s about to murder Deckard. Now he owes her.

Then there’s the ultimate kicker:

RACHAEL

(to Deckard)

That Voight-Kampf test of yours. Did you ever take it yourself?

By this point in the story, Deckard’s entire world has been turned on its head. He has become 100% emotionally involved in Rachael’s dilemma. He loves her. Her pain has become his pain. But if he doesn’t do what his role as a blade runner commands him to, the consequences for him are as fatal as they are for Rachael.

What is he going to do about this?

In other words,

when the “male” uncovers the mystery carried by the “female,” he is forced to make a moral choice.

A choice that constitutes the theme and soul of the story.

In Casablanca, Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), encountering the mystery embodied by Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), must make a choice.

In Chinatown, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), coming face to face with the mystery embodied by Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), must make a choice.

If you haven’t seen the 1982 Blade Runner, I won’t spoil the ending for you. Suffice it to say, Deckard does what a hero is supposed to do.

Confronting the mystery, he makes a choice.

]]>https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/09/the-mystery-makes-the-hero-choose/feed/918828Male and Female in “Blade Runner 2049”https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/09/male-and-female-in-blade-runner-2049/
https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/09/male-and-female-in-blade-runner-2049/#commentsWed, 04 Sep 2019 08:39:05 +0000https://stevenpressfield.com/?p=18820I’m going to generalize wildly in this post so please bear with me. Many exceptions could be cited legitimately to the principle I’m about to put forward (and maybe the principle itself is completely wrong). But it’s thought-provoking and its exploration, I hope, will give us all something to chew on.

Ryan Gosling as “K” in Blade Runner 2049

If, as we have proposed in earlier posts in this series,

The female carries the mystery,

then what is the male’s role?

(Bear in mind that the “male” in our story could be a female, e.g. Diana in Wonder Woman or Sara Paretsky’s tough private eye V.I. Warshawski or any of the powerful female leads in Game of Thrones, etc.)

The male’s role is to uncover the mystery.

The inciting incident of any story (remember, I’m generalizing shamelessly) is the introduction of the mystery.

We, the reader/audience, get hooked by this. As does the “male” lead.

Act Two becomes the male lead’s quest to get to the bottom of the mystery.

In Act Three, he succeeds. But, if the story is a good one, this revelation only leads to a deeper mystery—a mystery that sheds light on some profound aspect of life or love or the human condition.

In Blade Runner 2049, the male principle is embodied by “K” (Ryan Gosling). K is a blade runner—a professional operative whose job is to hunt down and kill the manufactured humans called replicants. K is a replicant himself, and he knows it. He accepts his role and has no aspiration to defy or overthrow it.

The mystery is introduced, i.e. the story’s inciting incident, when K (and his human superior, Lt. Joshi [Robin Wright]) learn that somehow, against all logic and design, a replicant (we don’t know who) has conceived and given birth to a child. That’s an earth-shaking event in the futuristic world of the story because it means that manufactured entities have the potential for becoming human, for actually possessing souls.

That’s also a pretty cool mystery.

K is assigned by Joshi to find and, in the name of world order and stability, to kill this child.

Act Two consists of K’s odyssey attempting to fulfill this assignment.

If our principle holds true, the story’s mystery will be carried by a female.

Sure enough, it is.

After many a twist and turn (during which K comes to believe that he himself is that mysterious child), he encounters Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), a “memory designer,” who herself, we believe, is a replicant and whose job is to create the artificial memories that will be implanted in other newly-manufactured replicants.

Carla Juri as memory-maker Dr. Ana Stelline in “Blade Runner 2049”

Dr. Stelline is by far the most empathetic (and human) character that K has encountered. She cares. She is kind. K gets a feeling about her.

By Act Three, K has tracked down the fugitive blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) from the original 1982 movie. Deckard himself is a replicant. From Deckard K learns that Dr. Stelline is indeed the miraculous child he had been hunting.

In other words, K has uncovered the mystery … and this mystery is embodied in a female.

When a story works, as I would say this one does, the superficial mystery—Who is the replicant child?—is reinforced and made profound by the deeper levels of meaning that this mystery implies.

What is “soul?” Where does it come from? Is it “divine?” What does “divine” mean? Does soul possess a life-imperative of its own, that is, will it find its way into any and every life-form?

How should we feel about despised and outcasted groups in society? Dare we dismiss them, as the culture in Blade Runner dismisses replicants, as “soul-less” or subhuman? What if we ourselves are members of such a group?

In Blade Runner 2049, the male has found and identified the female-borne mystery. But this discovery only leads to deeper and more profound levels of mystery.

The movie Lawrence of Arabia, like The Wild Bunch or Seven Samurai or Moby Dick, is a story without any primary female characters. How, then, can it follow the principle we’ve been exploring in the past three posts:

The female carries the mystery.

The answer, I think, is that Lawrence himself (Peter O’Toole) is the female element.

Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif in “Lawrence of Arabia”

Lawrence is the female element and the male element.

The primary issue posed by David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia (or at least one of several primary issues) is, to my mind,

How can an individual reconcile his own authentic greatness with the fact that he still remains human, fallible, and mortal?

To me, Lawrence was two people. The male element lay in Lawrence’s insuperable will to pre-eminence. The film emphasizes this young British officer’s superhuman ability to overcome adversity, his capacity to outlast, out-endure, out-survive on their own turf even the most brilliant and redoubtable Arab leaders.

And Lawrence achieved this pre-eminence in the archetypal “male” way—through assertive and aggressive action and initiative. He was the thunder from heaven; he was the rain that made fertile the plain. But Lawrence’s power came from the union of this male aggression with the female element—his genius and his charisma.

This was the mystery. It was the unexplainable, unknowable element that Lawrence brought that no one else—not the greatest and most illustrious commanders and politicians of the British or the Arab camps—could duplicate or explain.

It was Lawrence’s vision and creativity (in other words, the mystery carried by his female half) as much as any “leadership skills” that changed history—Lawrence’s idea to cross the uncrossable Nefud desert, to attack the Turkish stronghold at Aqaba from the landward side, and much, much more.

SHERIF ALI (OMAR SHARIF)

Truly for some men nothing is written unless they write it themselves.

The turning point in Lawrence of Arabia comes when Lawrence is captured by the Turks and tortured. Before this, his self-conception had been entirely “male,” that is cerebral, mental, “of reason.” But in that long night of beatings, Lawrence’s flesh gave way and his mind followed.

How can an individual reconcile his own authentic greatness with the fact that he still remains human, fallible, and mortal?

Another way of phrasing this might be

What becomes of the female half of us, which carries the mystery/power/creativity, when the male principle has lost faith in its own capacity?

T.E. Lawrence was as much a mystery to himself as he was to others. His saga, on the deepest level, was about his attempt to understand himself, that is, to reconcile the fact of his greatness with the simultaneous reality of his human frailty and mortality.

In a detective story like Chinatown or The Maltese Falcon, the male-female dynamic plays out between the Private Eye and the Femme Fatale. The male is attempting to solve the mystery presented by and carried by the female.

This was Lawrence’s internal story too. His quest was to find, to know, and to understand the unfathomable source of his own genius. He was simultaneously the detective and the woman of mystery.

The second half of Lawrence of Arabia is about Lawrence reconstituting that force and that charisma—but now out of despair instead of hope … and out of the foreknowledge of ultimate defeat even in the actuality of victory.

To me that is what made the historical Lawrence truly great. And also what made his story a tragedy.

The movie of Lawrence of Arabia begins, in a flash-forward, with Lawrence’s essential suicide in a motorcycle crash. This is really the movie’s end.

The movie answers its own question,

How can an individual reconcile his own authentic greatness with the fact that he remains ultimately human, fallible, and mortal?

And the answer is, “You can’t.” Or at least Lawrence, the historical Lawrence, couldn’t.

What insight do I take from this? One, at least, is the realization that we as storytellers don’t need a literally female character to remain true to the principle that

the female carries the mystery.

The male can carry this too.

We all, as has been said many times, contain both principles—male and female. Part of our internal saga must thus be the attempt to identify, to understand, and to learn to work with these opposing poles that constitute the source of our genius and our capacity for creativity.

]]>https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/08/male-and-female-in-lawrence-of-arabia/feed/1018811What is “Female?”https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/08/what-is-female/
https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/08/what-is-female/#commentsWed, 21 Aug 2019 08:47:17 +0000https://stevenpressfield.com/?p=18798In the past two posts we’ve been exploring the story idea that “the female carries the mystery.”

Then I understood that it wasn’t female as a gender, but female as the concept. The feminine pull vs the masculine push. In this instance, the female “hide” vs the masculine “seek”.

Andrea Reiman added something equally interesting.

The feminine is chaos, the masculine is order. Mountains are masculine, water is feminine, etc. But [“the] female carries the mystery” is a more nuanced understanding of chaos. Well, she does conceive, carry, and give birth, but it is a complete mystery how the conception took place, what is developing in utero, and what specific impact that offspring will have, right?

I confess I’m treading tentatively into this concept myself. Here’s another take from The Kybalion (1912, the Yogi Publication Society) expounding on one of the seven principles of Hermetic philosophy—the Principle of Gender:

The office is Gender is solely that of creating, producing, generating, etc. and its manifestations are visible on every plane of phenomena … the part of the Masculine Principle seems to be that of directing a certain inherent energy toward the Feminine Principle, and thus starting into activity the creative processes. But the Feminine principle is the one always doing the active creative work—and this is so on all planes. And yet each principle is incapable of operative energy without the assistance of the other.

In story terms, whatever element or character we might call “female” is the one that contains the “answer” to the question posed by the story itself—and that answer, at its most profound, is always a mystery.

I wrote, two posts ago, that I thought the feminine in Moby Dick (a book without literally female characters) was the ocean itself, the unfathomable depths of the sea. And that the female in Seven Samurai (a movie without a primary feminine character) was the flooded rice fields that the villagers were planting in the final scene.

Both these “female” elements are primal, elemental, ultimately unknowable—and of course cosmically “creative.” Both are the sources of life. And in both cases, how the feminine produces that life (as Andrea Reiman says above) is an absolute mystery.

The male element and the female element (with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab) in “Moby Dick.”

Neither story universe could exist without these female elements. They are the ground and foundation of the worlds of both sagas. All the “male” action in each drama—that taken by the whalers in Moby Dick and the bandits, the villagers, and the samurai in Seven Samurai—is about attempts to penetrate, conquer, understand, and achieve dominion over the “female” element, which is ultimately unconquerable and unknowable.

In both stories, the male stands in awe of the female (though he may never overtly articulate this), while striving simultaneously to overpower it and surrender to it. This struggle/attempt at union is what produces the drama. It’s what makes the story.

The seminal male-female union/clash in contemporary books and films seems to be the Detective (or the male lover) and the Femme Fatale (or damsel in distress.) Think Chinatown or Body Heat or Farewell, My Lovely. In such stories, as with Moby Dick or Seven Samurai, the male principle becomes bewitched by or drawn by powerful passions into a literal mystery (a crime, a backstory, a traumatic past) whose unknown element is held by, defended by, and often manipulated by the female.

The story itself is the record of the attempt(s) by the male principle to “get to the bottom” of that mystery held and protected by the female.

Deep stuff, ain’t it? We’ll keep exploring next week.

]]>https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/08/what-is-female/feed/1918798The Female Protects the Mysteryhttps://stevenpressfield.com/2019/08/the-female-protects-the-mystery/
https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/08/the-female-protects-the-mystery/#commentsWed, 14 Aug 2019 08:57:36 +0000https://stevenpressfield.com/?p=18785We said in last week’s post, speaking of novels or films with characters of both sexes, that

The female carries the mystery.

Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Mulwray in “Chinatown”

This principle, true as it is, is not enough to make a story work. In addition

The female protects the mystery.

Every story has a secret. Every tale has a meaning, an interpretation of depth.

The protagonist’s role (either a male, or a female acting in a “male” capacity) is to uncover that secret.

In Robert Towne’s script of Chinatown, the protagonist is private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson). His role in the drama is to get to the bottom of the “case”—to find out who murdered Hollis Mulwray, who hired him (Jake) and put him on this case, and what greater, deeper, more hideous crimes these first two issues conceal.

Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) is Jake’s client. She is the character who carries the mystery. She knows the answers to all these questions.

And, critically important for the story, she conceals them.

Evelyn knows what Jake, at the start, doesn’t. She knows the crimes her father Noah Cross (John Huston) has committed. She knows the further, even more despicable crime he’s trying to commit in the present.

For her own reasons—primarily to protect her daughter Catherine, but also to shield her own shame—Evelyn will resist to her final breath revealing these secrets.

For us as storytellers, this is exactly what we want.

We want in our stories a character who conceals the tale’s secret—i.e., its theme, its metaphor, its meaning—and who will do anything to maintain that secret.

Why do we want that? Because it provides powerful, drama-producing obstacles for our protagonist to overcome.

In some stories, like Chinatown, the female who carries the mystery knows what the mystery is. She’s aware of it. She’s deliberately concealing it.

In others, the “female” carrying the mystery doesn’t know it at all. She’s blind to it. She’s ignorant of it.

Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), the memory-maker in Blade Runner 2049, is unaware that she is the daughter of Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) and Rachael (Sean Young) and that she is thus the “miracle” that proves that replicants can reproduce and therefore possess souls and have hope for the future.

Carla Juri as memory-maker Dr. Ana Stelline in “Blade Runner 2049”

She carries the mystery but is unaware of it.

Likewise Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) in Far From Heaven is utterly clueless to the mystery of self-delusion and willful blindness that she carries.

This obliviousness works in story terms in both cases because it serves the same narrative purpose as Evelyn Mulwray’s conscious concealment—it keeps the protagonists (K [Ryan Gosling] in Blade Runner 2049; in Far From Heaven, Cathy Whitaker herself) laboring against powerful obstacles throughout the story to unravel the mystery.

A third category of mystery-carriers (and mystery-protectors) consists of primal or societal forces like the sea in Moby Dick or the farmers’ rice fields in Seven Samurai. Though these are not literally female, they are so metaphorically.

These also work story-wise because they cannot reveal their mystery. They are the mystery.

The takeaway for you and me as storytellers is that

One character in our drama must carry the story’s secret

and that character—for reasons of conscious will, ignorance, or incapacity—must present a monumental obstacle to the uncovering of that secret.

The female carries the mystery

And

The female protects the mystery.

]]>https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/08/the-female-protects-the-mystery/feed/1018785The Female Carries the Mysteryhttps://stevenpressfield.com/2019/08/the-female-carries-the-mystery-2/
https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/08/the-female-carries-the-mystery-2/#commentsWed, 07 Aug 2019 08:38:50 +0000https://stevenpressfield.com/?p=18775I’ve got a new book coming from W.W. Norton in November. It’s a novel called 36 Righteous Men. If you followed last year the series on this blog called “Report from the Trenches,” you know the details of the huge crash this book took, midstream in its writing, and of my six months of nonstop hell trying to regroup, restructure, and reanimate it.

Barbara Stanwyck as the fatal female in “Double Indemnity”

The concept that saved the day came from Shawn Coyne’s editorial notes:

The female carries the mystery.

This is a helluva deep subject and one that, even now, I have only the sketchiest and most tenuous handle on. Bear with me please. I’m gonna try, in the next few posts, to plunge into this topic and see if we can extract a kernel or two of wisdom.

What does it mean, “The female carries the mystery?”

It’s not hard to see in a movie like Chinatown, where the character of Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) is literally the woman of mystery, or in Double Indemnity, where Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) fulfills the same narrative purpose.

In both films—and just about every other film noir or detective story you or I can think of—the female lead has a secret she is hiding from the male lead (and from the world in general, including, at least partially, herself.)

The story is about finding out that secret.

Only when that secret is revealed does the movie deliver its knockout dramatic and thematic punch.

EVELYN MULWRAY

She’s my sister! She’s my daughter!

or

PHYLLIS DIETRICHSON

I’m rotten, Walter. Rotten to the heart.

But the idea that the female carries the mystery can be applied, I believe, even to novels and movies that literally have no female characters.

In Moby Dick, the female is the ocean.

The unplumbed, unknowable depths of the sea, into which the whale plunges, taking Ahab with him.

The eternal, unfathomable sea is the female.

In Seven Samurai, the flooded rice fields are the female. They are the well of fertility, the source of life. They are in fact what all the heroism and slaughter were about. They were the stakes of the story. They were the mystery.

Remember the final scene of Kurosawa’s all-time classic, when the villagers, to the beat of the communal tom-toms, replant their now-preserved fields while the surviving samurai can only watch and move on? That’s the mystery revealed.

Even in a story without human female characters, like Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” the female still carries the mystery

In my book, 36 Righteous Men, the central female character is a defrocked rabbi named Rachel Davidson.

In the first version of the novel—the one that crashed—I had Rachel indeed bearing the mystery (in other words, she knew all the details of the occult understory) but I had her trying deliberately and passionately to reveal this mystery.

Huge mistake.

Only when Shawn pointed out the error was I able to regroup and reconceive the story, at least as far as Rachel was concerned.

The change I made was to make her carry the mystery and hang onto it for dear life.

In other words, I turned every scene with Rachel on its head. Instead of having her seek to reveal, I had her seek to conceal.

It worked.

It made the other primary characters—two NYPD homicide detectives, a man and woman—dig deeper and harder. It made them do real detective work. It tripled the power of Rachel, and it supercharged the villain, whom Rachel was now covering for instead of trying to reveal.

I’ve been working on a new book for the past year—a totally different story, in another century and another genre. But the principle

The female carries the mystery

remains foremost in my working mind. I have stayed hyperconscious (and conscientious) at every stage—conception, construction, and the scene-by-scene writing—of who the “female” is, what mystery she carries, and how I can maintain that mystery and enhance it through Act One, Act Two, and Act Three to build to its maximum emotional impact in the climax.

]]>https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/08/the-female-carries-the-mystery-2/feed/2018775The Villain Doesn’t Change, Part Twohttps://stevenpressfield.com/2019/07/the-villain-doesnt-change-part-two/
https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/07/the-villain-doesnt-change-part-two/#commentsWed, 31 Jul 2019 08:49:35 +0000https://stevenpressfield.com/?p=18764It’s unfortunate that the term “McGuffin”—meaning that thing that the Villain wants—sounds so dopey.

Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon in Ron Shelton’s “Bull Durham”

Unfortunate because there’s a lot of meat to this idea.

I suspect Alfred Hitchcock, the person we associate most with the term McGuffin, wanted the name to sound silly. In his mind it didn’t matter what the McGuffin was—the nuclear codes, the letters of transit, the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. All that mattered for him was that the villain wanted it.

But the idea that the villain wants something—that he or she has an object of desire—is a topic worth examining in greater detail.

We’ve said in previous posts that

The villain never changes.

And further that

If the villain were capable of change, he’d be the hero.

Another way of putting this is that

The McGuffin never changes.

The villain wants the same thing at the end of the story as he or she did at the start.

Vic Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio) in Jurassic World wanted to weaponize the baby velociraptors.

We’ll never know of course, but it’s a pretty good bet that King Herod was not capable of waking up in the middle of the night and declaring, “Gee, this is a bad idea, killing all the innocents in Judea. Let me summon my generals and rescind that order.”

The villain never changes because what he/she wants never changes.

On the other hand, let’s consider the hero.

The hero does change

And

The hero is capable of wanting something different at the end of the story than he or she did at the start.

In fact you could make a strong case that the hero MUST change her or his want … that, in fact, that’s what makes her or him a hero.

Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) in The Silence of the Lambs goes from wanting to be a good little FBI agent to wanting to come into her own as an independent individual.

Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) in Far from Heaven goes from wanting to be a good wife and proper suburbanite to wanting to find out who she really is and what her real best life ought to be.

Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) in Bull Durham goes from wanting to keep playing ball as long as he can (and being a cool single dude) to wanting to make it to the majors as a manager (and bring Annie Savoy [Susan Sarandon] along.)

In other words, it isn’t just that

The villain does not change

while

The hero does change.

It’s that what the Villain wants doesn’t change, while what the hero wants does.

Why? Because I think Seth has described in a few short lines the Writer’s Life (or any artist’s life) in a way that nails it like nothing I’ve ever seen. Seth’s blog, by the way, is my go-to. It’s the first one I read every morning. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Seth Godin. Nobody better.

THE SOLO MARATHON

The usual marathons, the popular ones, are done in a group.

They have a start time.

A finish line.

A way to qualify.

A route.

A crowd.

And a date announced a year in advance.

Mostly, they have excitement, energy and peer pressure.

The other kind of marathon is one that anyone can run, any day of the year. Put on your sneakers, run out the door and come back 26 miles later. These are rare.

It’s worth noting that much of what we do in creating a project, launching a business or developing a career is a lot closer to the second kind of marathon.

No wonder it’s so difficult.

This is our life, yours and mine. I would add only two thoughts:

One, the long-form writer’s life (whether she’s writing fiction, nonfiction, TV, movies, whatever) is not just one marathon … and not just a marathon without spectators or Gatorade along the roadside or a sponsor or a ribbon and a medal at the end.

It’s one marathon after another.

Finish one, start another.

It’s marathoning as a way of life. As life itself.

And two, for me anyway, I wouldn’t want to live any other way.

I thank heaven every day that I don’t have to go to a job or report to a boss or have anyone or anything telling me what I can and cannot do.

I love the marathoning life.

I love to start on one overwhelming (to me) killer project and see it through, no matter what it takes, to the end.

I love finishing one and starting the next.

Oh, there’s a third thing.

An interviewer asked me the other day if I ever got lonely writing. I answered immediately, “No.” (In other words, I don’t mind at all that there are no spectactors lining the race course, or lists of finishers in the newspaper, etc.)

Here, in no particular order, is a sampling of real-life non-zero-sum characters.

Jesus of Nazareth

The 300 Spartans at Thermopylae

Joan of Arc

Abraham Lincoln

A non-zero-sum kinda guy

Mahatma Gandhi

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

John F. Kennedy

Malcolm X

Robert Kennedy

John Lennon

Yitzhak Rabin

And a few from fiction and motion pictures:

Odysseus

Beowulf

Atticus Finch

Huckleberry Finn

Celie in The Color Purple

Rick Blaine in Casablanca

Pike, Dutch, and the Gortch Brothers in The Wild Bunch

Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) in Saving Private Ryan

Shane

Travis Bickle

Princess Leia

Luke Skywalker

If the Villain believes in a zero-sum world, the Hero believes in its opposite.

If the Villain believes in a universe of scarcity, the Hero believes, if not in a world of abundance, then at least in the possibility of such a world.

If the Villain believes in a reality dominated by fear, the Hero believes in one ruled by love.

The Villain is cynical. He or she believes that mankind is inherently evil. The Villain believes in “reality,” in a Hobbesian world of all-against-all.

The Villain is not necessarily “bad” or even “villainous.” In the villain’s eyes, he is the Good Guy. He is simply acting and making choices within a universe of monsters. He must therefore become, in the name of Good (or at least self-preservation or the preservation of those dear to him) a monster himself.

The zero-sum view of life is that of limited resources. Not enough to go around. If you and I want our share (or even simply enough to survive), we must take it from somebody else. However much of the pie we grab, that’s how much less remains for everyone else.

In the non-zero-sum world, on the other hand, resources are infinite. The love a mother gives to her child (and that the child returns) grows greater, the more each loves. There is and can never be a shortage of love.